New app merges Drive and Photos, gains the ability to back up arbitrary folders.

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All the usual features are here, with the new option of backing up any folder.

The Drive options let you exclude that massive Google Photos folder.

Storage status and a few more checkboxes.

The tray icon menu shows last synced items, has links to Drive and Photos, and talks a bit about the transition.

The about page.

On the web-side of things, there's a new "Computers" section.

Click on anything to see your computer-specific files.

On the Web, Google Drive is mostly used as a competitor to Microsoft Office. You get apps for word processing, spreadsheets, and slides. On a desktop computer, the Drive app takes on a different form—it's a Dropbox competitor, syncing your files to the cloud from a special folder. This week, Google announced the Drive desktop app is changing; it's not even called "Drive" anymore. Now this app is called "Google Backup and Sync," and it gains a few new features while merging with the Google Photos Syncing app.

While it isn't happening by default yet, it looks like Google is planning on automatically upgrading users of the Drive and Photos syncing apps to the new unified app. It's clearly the new version of the Drive app (just version 3.x instead of 2.x), and running the installer will do an in-place upgrade of the prior app. On the first launch, a dialog box explains a bit about the transition.

The new app has all the features of the Drive and Photos apps, and it links to both sites in the menu. But there's one major new feature that takes the app out of the Dropbox mold it was originally cast in: you can now back up any folder to Google Drive, instead of just the single "cloud folder." A UI lets you open a folder dialog box, where you can cloud-enable any folder, anywhere on your computer.

This seems to basically be a backup system. On the Drive Web app, you'll see all your computers listed, and rather than moving the new folder into the Drive directory, backed up folders from each computer live under the computer names. These are computer-specific files and don't get synced down to other devices. It's strictly a backup system.

Having Google Photos exist as part of Drive is still a bit of a clunky feature. I don't need hundreds of gigabytes of historical photos downloaded to all my computers by default. Fortunately, you can still pick and choose which folders you want to sync, allowing you to uncheck the "Google Photos" folder.

Backup and Sync will eventually hit your computer if you have the Drive or Photos sync apps installed, but you can manually download it here.

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Ron Amadeo
Ron is the Reviews Editor at Ars Technica, where he specializes in Android OS and Google products. He is always on the hunt for a new gadget and loves to rip things apart to see how they work. Emailron@arstechnica.com//Twitter@RonAmadeo